Alexander Jablokov > Quotes

“Death is real, irreversible, and awful. Do you want some advice? Don't wait until you're dead to try to communicate. Do it now. You still have a chance. Not a great one, but a better one than you will have. If you think it's hard to get your point across now, and that no one really understands what you're about, just try it when you're dead.”
― Alexander Jablokov, Brain Thief

“His action of joining them, which would have been rude in a restaurant that was not moving at three hundred kilometers an hour, was perfectly acceptable on a train, which mimicked the entirely random joinings of life but revealed their true nature by making them last only hours or days, rather than years and decades. People on a train form an alliance, as if the world that surrounded the parallel rails were hostile and and they refugees from it. The dining car, humming and rocking gently in the night, annihilated past and future and made all associations outside of itself seem vaguely unreal. So they welcomed him at their table, for he was one of them, a traveler, not one of those wraiths through whose night-lit cities they passed.”
― Alexander Jablokov, Carve the Sky

“When I was young," I say, beginning with the most painful words an old man knows.”
― Alexander Jablokov, The Breath of Suspension

“They tended to dominate the air and liked annihilating things through saturation bombing, like gleefully violent children.”
― Alexander Jablokov, A Deeper Sea

“When I was young,' I say, beginning with the most painful words an old man knows.”
― Alexander Jablokov, The Breath of Suspension

“I read this book a few decades ago, on a trip to some of the territories of the old Byzantine Empire, during which an emotional relationship came to an emotionally draining end, so it may retain some of the hectic inanity of my personal life, but great works are fractal, reflecting both our grand ambitions and our petty failures.

------------From a review on Goodreads”
― Alexander Jablokov